Working with VSTO

Question

Hi,

I would like to know first what is the difference between VSTO Excel 2007 Workbook and VSTO Excel 2007 Add-In.

In what scenarios either VSTO excel 2007 workbook or VSTO Excel 2007 Add-In or both is preferred.

I would like to learn VSTO Excel 2007 using C# with some good examples and working with the same at high level of usage in real time scenario.

Please suggest me some very good links or websites and provide me some good ebooks related to VSTO excel2007 using C# where i can learn VSTO excel2007 much more.

Kindly help me with any ebooks or Good links to study or learn the same.

Answer 1

A VSTO workbook has predefined sheets, named ranges, etc. It's associated with a particular document. In other words you can think of the VSTO workbook as a "smart workbook". In fact I think they even used to call it that.

A VSTO addin on the other hand always loads with Excel, even if there is no document loaded. It's better suited for addin functionality that applies to Excel the application rather than a particular workbook.

For example, if you were going to create a document that when cells are changed, they update a back end database automatically, you would do this in a VSTO workbook.

If you were going to make an addin that allowed you to speak into any cell and have the speech recognition engine turn that into a number, you would make a VSTO addin.